Arnaldo Otegi Mondragón (born 6 July 1958) is a
Basque politician
and spokesman for the Basque
separatist party Batasuna, which was declared illegal in 2003
for its ties with ETA, a violent
separatist organization proscribed as terrorist.

Before entering politics, he had been convicted for having been
a militant of ETA, taking part in
several actions. Then in the 1990s, after having served time, he
started his career in politics, quickly gaining prominence within
Basque separatism and becoming the leader of Batasuna. On 27 April
2006 he was sentenced to 15 months in prison for glorifying
terrorism in a speech he gave in 2003 in commemoration of the
killing of a prominent ETA member 25 years ago. He started serving
the sentence on 8 June 2007 [1] and
was then released from prison in August 2008. In October 2009 he
was arrested again for attempting to reform Batasuna.

Biography

Between 1977 and 1989 he was actively involved in several
operations conducted by ETA, a
separatist organization seeking to establish a Marxist-Leninist
Basque state. On 21 February 1989 he was found guilty of kidnapping and imprisoned
for four years [2].
He decided to change the approach through which he would effect the
change he desired. In the Basque parliamentary
election, 1994 he was the seventh placed candidate in Guipuzcoa
on the list of Herri Batasuna (HB), a pro-Basque
independence party linked to ETA. HB won six seats at the election
with Otegi initially failing to be elected but on 27 September
1995, he became an MP, substituting a party colleague. In November
1997 the Spanish Supreme
Court sentenced several senior members of Herri Batasuna to
seven years in jail, due to alleged involvement with ETA, and in
the resulting power vacuum, Joseba Permach and Otegi were chosen to
fill the new provisional leadership of Herri Batasuna.

On 12 September 1998, Otegi played a key role in the formulation
of the "Declaration of Estella/Lizarra", which proposed to solve
the Basque conflict by beginning a process of dialogue with other
nationalist parties, most prominently, the Partido
Nacionalista Vasco (PNV). In the Basque parliamentary
election, 1998, he was a candidate for the party Euskal Herritarrok, which had replaced
Herri Batasuna, representing the region of Gipuzkoa. The
Lizarra-Garazi agreements, which resulted in an ETA truce at that
time, helped give Euskal Herritarrok their best results in
ten years, and they became the third-largest political party in
Basque Country and the adjacent region of Navarre. This popularity in terms of votes was
reversed as ETA broke the truce with new assassinations.

Recent
trials

In August 2000, a senior court in Basque Country accused Arnaldo
Otegi of "glorifying terrorism", after allegedly he had shouted
"¡Gora Euskadi ta Askatasuna!" in France. However, the Supreme Court (Tribunal Supremo)
closed the case, stating that crimes such as "glorifying terrorism"
could not be pursued if committed abroad.[3][4] This
precedent was then called forth by the Audiencia Nacional concerning the Carmelo Soria case
[5].

In May 2005 Arnaldo Otegi was put on trial for membership of the
separatist group ETA, and posted bail for €400,000. Arnaldo Otegi
was arrested the next year, only three days after ETA called off its
"ceasefire". Simultaneously, a Supreme Court
ruling confirmed a 15-month prison sentence against Otegi for
"glorifying terrorism," [1][2] committed in
2003. He appealed the conviction, but a panel of judges unanimously
rejected the appeal. Furthermore, Otegi was sentenced to a year in
prison in November 2005, on allegations of slander made against King
Juan Carlos during a 2003 news conference. Otegi had then
stated that the King was the "chief of the Spanish army, that's to
say, the person responsible for the torturers, who favour torture
and impose his monarchic regime on our people through torture and
violence" [2].